Praise and Criticism for Common Standards, Test Guidelines

A commentary by Grant Wiggins of "Understanding By Design" fame is generating some interesting debate on our website. Wiggins critiques the common math standards and finds them lacking. Check out the comments section of the piece, which has some spirited back-and-forth, and also some resources created by the lead writers of the standards.

Those of you who are interested in this conversation might want to check out some love recently penned for the standards by math researcher Steven Leinwand, who urges Virginia to reconsider its decision not to adopt them.

Another recent piece of interest comes from the Fordham Institute's Flypaper blog. Kathleen Porter-Magee solicited feedback from W. Stephen Wilson, a professor of math and education at Johns Hopkins University, on the math content specifications recently released by the SMARTER Balanced Assessment Consortium. That's one of the two state groups that are designing tests for the common standards. To say that Wilson finds the content specifications lacking would be an understatement. It's worth noting, too, that Wilson served on the working group that wrote the math standards.

For those of you on the ELA side of things, Porter-Magee reflects on the content frameworks released by the other consortium, PARCC, in an earlier post here. She examines the SBAC content specifications in ELA in a separate post here.

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